Wednesday, May 12, 2010

MMO-Champion announced early today that Blizzard formally asked them to remove all leaked Cataclysm information from the website. This includes any information posted on the sites forums as well as information posted to the main news feed.

Personally I think it's a good thing Blizzard is enforcing the NDA to some extent and even though MMO-Champion is a huge site that gets a ton of traffic, I have a feeling Blizzard pays attention to as much as possible across the internet for all "unofficial" cataclysm information.

I admittedly ate up the information that was posted on the site, but I also have no issue waiting for the beta to start and the NDA to be lifted before seeing more than what Blizzard intends for the public to see.

This brings me nicely to my next topic: Relatively long blue post about cataclysm professions was released on the European forums and I'm pretty happy with most of the changes.

Engineering:

Engineering is still being designed, but expect new unpredictable gadgets to use on yourself or enemies. Toys, explosives, and even a new vanity pet or two. Oh, and powerful mechanical bows and crossbows in addition to guns.

In general, we want Engineering to remain a tradeskill mainly focused on creating fun or useful gadgets for the engineer, but we are exploring options for items that can be sold to other players for profit.

I'm really happy they are keeping Engineering relatively the same. Just give me a new (or keep the current) rocket boots and cloak parachute and I'll consider any other new/interesting additions as added perks!

Alchemy:

New elixirs will be about 75% as strong as flasks. So you can get more total stat points with two elixirs, but flasks will still be the best at giving you a single offensive or defensive stat.

New unique material used by nearly all high-level recipes will be created by alchemists on a one-day cooldown.

New Mysterious Potion created with common materials restores health and mana in a massively random range, as well as sometimes granting the benefit of another potion. The health and mana range is from 1-20,000 and is able to crit. The minimum amount restored, however, is scaled upwards by the Alchemy skill, making it a great choice for alchemists to keep for themselves.

All potions and elixirs now use the same basic vial type. Flasks still use a fancy vial.

New Alchemist Stone.

I'll be honest I'm kind of on the fence with Alchemy right now. Everything in this preview looks promising with the exception of possibly the elixir change in the first bullet. As long as elixirs persist through death (which I highly doubt) the change is fine, but either way the rest of the alchemy preview looks promising. I really like the idea of the Mystery potion and it's added benefit to Alchemists; however, I have to admit I've been thinking of switching over to Jewelcrafting for some time now because of the added stats. And the flexibility that comes with that.

I suppose I will wait until Cataclysm releases or at least further into the alpha/beta before I make my decision, but it's something to keep watching.

Yes there is significant story and reason for it to be added, yes it will add some diversity to off-set/trinket slots for characters, yes it will keep people busy before cataclysm starts, but at least be a bit more creative than just adding a new boss with re-used models and popping in three fake...err excuse me.."mini-bosses".

It's never felt "epic" or mustered a sense of accomplishment, at least for me, fighting boss minions that have more health than regular trash and unique names, but cause no real threat to the success of a raid (see: Obsidian Sanctum drakes [if not doing hard-mode] & Freya tree adds [if not doing hard-mode]).

Time sink city if we have to kill a whole bunch of trash waves...yay!

Sorry for the ranting - I'm done. /hug

VoA comes through big and T10 4-piece really is THAT good

I was sitting at around 71ish frost emblems when this week started and had full intentions of picking up the T10 iLvl 251 legs from the vendor once I hit 95 emblems, but the first thing Berserk does as a guild once raid time starts on Tuesdays is head over to Wintersgrasp and knock out Toravon for some easy badges and hopefully something usef...BAM iLvl 264 feral pants drop! So now I'm sitting pretty at 105+ emblems after ICC 25 last night and I now have my 4-piece tanking set.

It's kind of funny with the current system how a couple weeks ago I was starved for emblems and had to be careful about every purchase I made and now I'm practically swimming in them so to speak.

Regardless it seems as though my expertise and hit rating woes are solved. I went ahead and picked up this beauty for 7k gold on the AH to make up for the hit I was losing by swaping from T9 pants to T10, and I'm pretty happy with my overall stats now.

And oh yeah - the T10 4-piece is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. This is something anyone who is a bear tank has probably known for at least a couple months, but the low cool down on Enrage makes this fantastic in conjunction with Barkskin.

Hopefully some solid attempts on Arthas tonight after we get Sindragosa down in 25 man! Hopefully they let me solo tank Sindragosa and MT Arthas at least for Phase One.